Well May is over and I finished yesterday the last of the posts on the Founders At Work Digest. The book by Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston was dense with practical advice from people who had built and sold successful startup technology companies. I started taking notes and had originally intended to write-up a single post summarizing my thoughts but I ended up with way too many thoughts and decided to do the “post a day for the month of May” series instead.

So what is the secret sauce that freed these founders from the laws of physics that bind the rest of us and allowed them to create amazing companies that changed the world? While there is no single “success chromosome” that can be identified, there were definite themes and character traits that became apparent across all the stories. I highly recommend this book to anyone with a startup. If you’re thinking about buying it, scan the digest first for the major takeaways and decide if it’s worth it. I summarized each story and peppered the commentary with anecdotes from our own founder perspective having built JumpBox from scratch over the past year. I hope you find it useful. Enjoy!